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@Archgeek: "In my defense, they have the best ratio of lift to mass of any aero part."
20% better than the others! But it looks like you're carrying fuel tanks. The Big-S strake has the normal lift to mass, but carries fuel. If you compare the strake to equivalent lift from fins, the strake is only 17 kg heavier, which is a lot less than any fuel tank that carries 100 units.

An ionizing air filter actually does blow ions -- of course, they don't stay ions for long. But one disadvantage of them over HEPA filters is that they put out ozone (an advantage is that you don't need to replace the filter).
As for SIP, let me google that for you: structural insulated panel. It's foam sandwiched between plywood boards. That composite has structural strength, and is highly insulated. And it comes in panels. Those construction industry people are no poets, but they do make good materials.

I don't understand what's wrong about any of those...
1. My first permanent job as a researcher was at NASA Ames, which is an airbase.
2. I use an ionizing air filter as a fan (and to clean up the air).
3. A friend build her house out of Structural Insulated Panels.
4. I land at the island to test whether my plane can land in a tricky spot, without having to fly halfway around the globe to find out that my stall speed is too high or landing gear is poorly place.
5. I've climbed on old structures plenty.
6. Fighter jets with no weapons would make for a better world.
7. Stuffing kerbals in service bays... well... ok, yes, that's a bit wrong

The surface distance traveled seems not to factor out orbital velocity correctly, somehow. I have a save where there's a plane that splashed down after just over 7,000 km of flight. Flying slightly slower (200 m/s rather than a variable rate slowly accelerating from 200 to 250 m/s over a period of hours), when I cross that spot my plane has over 10,000 km of flight.

I've built a nice reliable tourist bus that costs $5050 to launch, takes two tourist to LKO every time. Round-trip time: about 30 minutes, in part because I set the chutes to open quite low: 1km for the little chute on the nose to get me to not die, but 600m and 400m for the two radial chutes so I don't just linger in the air forever.
On the maiden flight, I wanted to see how far I could make it glide on re-entry. It was dark. At about 2500m I chickened out and decided to throw open the chutes.
They opened fully. Even the 400m chute.
Then I took a crew report and noticed I was in the mountains...

I decided to play cavekerbal mode, as @GoSlash27 mentioned a while back: no building updates until your R&D is maxed out.
The most significant effects:
• Rather harder to plot a path to Mun when you don't even know if you've got an intercept (because you can't upgrade the tracking center).
• Rather less science is available in space when you can't EVA (because you can't upgrade the astronaut center).
• So much money piles up when you can't sink it into real estate!
It's worth getting the Juno and wheels ASAP so you can milk all the science around KSC.
There's about 300 science to pick up like that on normal settings: 8 biomes for the buildings and crawl way (not counting the launch sites), plus five situations a short roll from base (grassland, tundra, shore landed, shore splashed, water splashed).
And then you can grew crew and thermometer flying over the local biomes, fly to the island airfield for another couple bonus science, and land on the hill above it to get highlands.
Bob is particularly useful on these early runs to be able to get everything in one trip, reusing the goo and materials bay.

Paid copies is one thing; active players is another, and they're not precisely connected. Some people buy games and never install them (particularly on Steam). Some people play games they never bought. Some very dedicated people play games actively for a while and then drop them -- for a game that's been around for five years that's going to be a lot of people.
And with the KerbalEDU program, that makes it even harder to evaluate how many individuals were touched by the game versus how many seats were sold.

I've done it manually, eyeballing it, without the upgraded flight control facilities.
But that was a fluke. I usually don't succeed in sandbox unless I'm really trying (with mechjeb or precisenode and so on)

In the VAB, lift is calculated as if wind were coming down from above, and very slightly (less than a degree) from the East.
In the SPH, it's from what by default is forwards, and very slightly from below.
Where you root part is doesn't matter for that.

I presume I'm just a bad interface to google, but I'm not finding release notes for 1.2?
I mean, other than this old thread, but it seems like the development priorities have changed in the year and a half since.

I accelerated at 3.6 mm/s.
Yes, seriously, *milli*meters per second. I have 26.9 kN of thrust to 26.8 kN of drag, and 27t of mass to accelerate. TWR of about 0.1 doesn't translate to big accelerations, especially in the atmosphere.
This is based on my most ridiculous plane yet: a single Wheesley pushing up three pairs of Fat-55 wings, plus two Mk1 fuel tanks and two Big-S strakes. I have a single canard-style elevon up front for pitch control, because I didn't quite balance everything perfectly (after burning off 200 units I was able to get things balanced better with some fuel transfers). For roll and yaw I use the cockpit's control wheels.

Best of luck!
I just hope you don't get stuck in an air-conditioned room in Tampa bombing Yemeni civilians -- for which I hear video game skills are particularly needed. Those pilots apparently suffer PTSD a lot more than pilots who actually end up in theatre.